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User blog:Psychicken17/A Brief History of Scribblenauts Wiki
The Scribblenauts Wiki has had a long, storied history. I got bored and decided to chronicle it. Introduction by Carl Sagan HOW DO I GET THIS MERIT BLARRRRRRGH Thank you. Please carry on. Precambrian Era (2009) On June 7, just after Scribblenauts was shown off at E3, a fellow named KingTT decides to create a wiki about it. Since the game hasn't been released yet, there is very little content. TL;DR Nothing happens until the Cambrian Explosion of 2010. Cambrian Explosion (Early 2010) Soon, 3 users enter the wiki and shake things up for a bit. They all entered on Jan. 25, 2010. These people are WalkingTalkingCactus, Megatron1, and Thiocyanate. Megatron1 hails from the Smashwiki, and decided to adopt the wiki after the leader left and there were practically no editors. WalkingTalkingCactus made the former level template (the one with the table with par and difficulty) that was replaced in 2012. These users also catagorized tons of things. Thiocyanate took a crack at an early object template, and while it seems primitive now, it was a big leap. Eventually, WalkingTalkingCactus was promoted to admin (Megatron1 already had adminship for adopting the wiki.) However, this era soon ended. The Dark Ages (Spring-Summer 2010) Throughout spring to summer 2010, no major advancements were made and despite a few hard-working users, not much of significance happened. The Progressive Era (Summer-Winter 2010) During late August, a new face entered Scribblenauts wiki. They were none other than Maxwell the Scribblenaut! They were pretty much the only major editor at that point. Objects were catagorized, pages were made, and all around good times were had. Maxwell was made admin by Megatron1 (who was semi-active) A mini-boom came during late October. Two users, Psychicken17 and Mafia Mettaur joined. Mettaur didn't do too much editing, but introduced the wiki to the wonders of spritesheets. Spritesheets were extremely useful for users who were looking to add pictures but didn't want to use emulators, and were used right up until the release of Scribblenauts Unlimited. All was not well though. Megatron1 got fed up with Wikia and left the Scribblenauts Wiki. He now resides at the NIWA Smashwiki. From there, things were quiet. Reconstruction (Winter-Spring 2011) With only a handful of active users, not many major changes happened in the start of 2011. The biggest event was probably Faceman667's pagebombs of February. He was a user who took many pictures of Scribblenauts vehicles and weapons and made many very short pages about them. The wiki gained about 112 pages in 2 days! He quickly left though, leaving the active users even more stubs. As of June 2012, most of those pages have been constructed into well-written articles. At the very end of this era, Maxwell the Scribblenaut went on an indefinate hiatus, but not before giving adminship to Psychicken17, the most active user at the time. The New Deal (Summer-Fall 2011) Left with a sea of stubs and a miniscule amount of editors, Psychicken17 did not know what to do, so he waited. His wishes were granted in the new user of Drakez. Drakez's proposed a group of ideas that we'll call the New Deal. It proposed the following: #A template would be made for objects. #All objects would use this same template. #Spritesheets and emulators would be used to grab images, making complete object articles. The New Deal was an amazing success, and pulled the wiki out of the Depression it was in. Drakez was given adminship, and the two got to work adding templates and pictures everywhere they could. Soon another user with similar intentions came in, Joshduman! He added many pages, all in the correct template and with pictures. He, too, became a quick admin. Sadly, this trifecta was not to last. With the summer ending, Drakez and Joshduman both became inactive, and the rest of 2011 was quiet. The Second Dark Ages (Winter 2011-2012) Editors came and went, but school slogged many editors down. Many users joined and contributed, but in the end, only a few dedicated users such as CandD stayed. The Great Awakening (Spring 2012-Winter 2012) During February 2012, A new user came in, Reversinator. They did many things the same as Joshduman. They added lots of pictures, templates, categories, and the like. The old admin Maxwell the Scribblenaut also made a brief return. Later on, admin Joshduman returned as well. All of these users quickly made many accomplishments. The Second New Deal is as follows: #An easier to use object template #New adjective+level templates #Templates to signify stubs or pages needing images #Categorizing all images At the very end of this era, Scribblenauts Unlimited came out, many users who had returned earlier had vanished again, and all the editors made one collective sigh, because now the images had to be updated again. How would we update the 1000+ object pages for Unlimited's arrival? The Age of Toastmonster (Winter 2013-Summer 2013) Toastmonster was how we would update the images. With a great working attitude and hundreds of high-quality Scribblenauts Unlimited images, Toastmonster was the one to finally push the wiki into being updated. In just 3 months, he had made over 5,000 edits, reached #1 on the leaderboard, and obtained adminship. An active core of Toastmonster, CandD, Nintendalek42, and Psychicken17 were able to make huge advances, and in just a few months, the wiki gained over a thousand pages and many great images. On June 19, 2013, Toastmonster announced his retirement from the wiki and has not edited since. Morale kind of dropped afterwards, and though the rest of the core remained active, edits dwindled and by the end of summer, the wiki was much less active. The user Rhythmwalker also joined during this era and edited pretty consistently as well. The Third Dark Ages (Fall 2013-Spring 2014) By the end of September, the core was much less active as a whole Psychicken17 had become an utter trashlord and pretty much stopped editing. CandD was promoted to administrator but didn't edit too much during the fall. Nintendalek42 began editing pretty much once a day. The wiki hadn't completely faded away, but by this point editing has very clearly slowed down. The Scratch (April 6-9) The Scratch (A name which I decided on just now, sorry if it's lame or something) was a pretty big disruption in the lull we were stuck in. To keep it short, the old admin Maxwell the Scribblenaut, long since dormant, apparently got hacked by another dormant user, Tornadospeed. He used his admin powers to ban the active users and deface the wiki and delete a lot of pages. You can read the full story here. Post-Scratch (Spring 2014-Summer 2014) After the Scratch, Psychicken17 decided to stop being a trashlord and start actively editing a bit more. We'll see how long that lasts. RhythmWalker was also promoted to admin right after the Scratch. Will editing pick up again? Will Toastmonster ever return? Will we ever return to the amount of editing during the Age of Toastmonster? Will Psychicken17 stop self-inserting himself into this? Only time will tell. The Fire Fades (Fall 2015-Present) Yeah, things didn't really pick up. Summer 2014 was the last time anyone made long-term sustained quality editing. Psychicken17 had one last burst of motivation in 2015 where they made pages for all the different types of cats in the games, then slipped back into retirement. All of the other admins had moved on as well. I wonder what they're up to these days. Anyways, new users come and go every once in a while, but without role model editors or a sense of duty, nobody really sticks around. This wiki is not quite a ghost town, but its era surely has ended. Elsewhere, it seemed like 5th Cell was undergoing a similar decline. In 2015, they announced a new title: a free-to-play action RPG titled Anchors in the Drift. However, their attempts at fundraising it fell short, and its development is either incredibly slow or nonexistant. In 2016, Warner Brothers cancelled their upcoming mobile game Scribblenauts: Fighting Words and 5th Cell was forced to lay off almost all of their employees. It looks like Scribblenauts as a series, and maybe 5th Cell as a whole, are effectively over. Afterword Unless there's some sort of miracle, it looks like this site's story is basically finished. Thank you for reading! Both the Scribblenauts games and this wiki were pretty formative to me, so I'd like to thank everyone who helped make this place happen. We never did add all the objects, adjectives, and levels (we didn't even start the Scribblenauts Unmasked stuff), but we came impressively close for a ragtag team of what I assume to be middle and high schoolers at the time. Toastmonster, Nintendalek, CandD, Joshduman... I have no idea what y'all are up to these days, but I hope you're doing well, and thanks for everything! User:Psychicken17 (talk) 01:46, July 27, 2017 (UTC) Category:Blog posts